St Alphege London Wall

St Alphege London Wall — also spelled St Alphage, and sometimes called St Alphege Cripplegate from the nearby gate — was a church of the City of London with the rare distinction of having occupied two different buildings in its long life, the first built directly against the London Wall itself, the second a medieval priory church. Today its surviving ruin, a flint and rubble tower amid the gardens of London Wall Place, is a Grade II listed centrepiece of one of the City's most imaginative modern public spaces.

The first church was built with the London Wall forming its entire northern side, its churchyard lying beyond the wall to the north. It is first mentioned around 1108–25, though said to have been established before 1068 — an ancient foundation dedicated to Alphege, the Archbishop of Canterbury martyred by the Danes in 1012. This church was closed by Act of Parliament at the end of the sixteenth century and demolished, leaving the Wall standing; its site became a carpenter's yard, then in 1837 a public garden, which survives today with a preserved stretch of the London Wall along its northern edge — a section of the Roman city wall, exposed when wartime bombing destroyed the last building against it, with the medieval wall built on top. When the new Salters' Hall opened beside it in 1976, the ground north of the Wall became the Hall's garden, and the stretch of roadway here was renamed St Alphage Gardens.

The parish's second church had begun as the priory church of the probably Benedictine nunnery of St Mary-within-Cripplegate, founded before the year 1000. By 1329 the community had decayed, and the land passed to William Elsing, who in 1331 founded a hospital on the site — Elsing Spital — taken over by Augustinian canons in 1340 and closed at the Dissolution in 1536. When the original St Alphege closed, the priory church became the new parish church; the rest of the Spital site passed to Sir John Williams, whose house there burned in 1541, the property later providing the home of Sion College, founded in 1630. The church was repaired in 1624, its steeple's upper part rebuilt in 1649, and it was damaged but not destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The eighteenth century was a story of genteel decline: repairs in 1684 and 1701, failed applications for enlargement funds to the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in 1711 and to Parliament in 1718, and by 1747 a steeple so unsound that the bells could not be rung — four of the six were sold.

In 1774 the church was found unfit for use and rebuilt for £1,350, retaining the medieval tower; the new church opened on 24 July 1777, with an east front to Aldermanbury and a north front to London Wall which the Victorian critic George Godwin found "both equally remarkable for want of taste in the arrangement, and of beauty in the effect". The east front had a Venetian window between pilasters flanked by doorways; the north front, two flattened Doric columns carrying an entablature and pediment, its doorway leading through a lobby into the medieval tower. Inside, Godwin sniffed, was "merely a plain room with a flat ceiling" — with the pulpit unconventionally placed against the west wall, so that the congregation faced away from the altar. By 1900 tower and porch were again decayed, and the north entrance was rebuilt with a neo-Gothic façade in 1913.

The twentieth century unmade the church by stages. Damaged in a First World War air raid, the parish was amalgamated with St Mary Aldermanbury in 1917; the church was repaired in 1919 yet scheduled for demolition the same year, its bells going to St Peter's, Acton. The nave came down in 1923, leaving tower and porch — the tower maintained with an altar and chairs as a little place of prayer until the Second World War, when fire gutted it in 1940. The Corporation's redevelopment of the bombed area from 1958, as part of the Barbican complex, removed the 1913 porch and the tower's upper levels. The amalgamated parish was united with St Giles-without-Cripplegate in 1954, and the ruin — a central tower of flint and rubble with arches on three sides, its south wall missing — was listed Grade II on 4 January 1950.

The story has a happy modern coda: in 2018–19, as part of the London Wall Place development with its raised walkways recalling the post-war highwalks, the tower ruin and its surroundings were renewed as the central feature of a new plaza and garden — London Wall Place and St Alphage Gardens — where office workers now eat lunch among the arches of the old priory church, beside the Roman wall that gave the first St Alphege its northern side nine centuries ago.